Mount Abraxas Press
ON THREEPENNY DOWN by Colin Insole
THE HOUSE OF THE MOON by Benjamin Tweddell
THE KNEES OF KIONGA by Rhys Hughes
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My previous reviews of this publisher: HERE
When I read in 2022 these strikingly luxurious and decorated booklets from 2021, my real-time thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
There may still be significant delays in commencing and then completing this review in the wake of my Elizabeth Bowen and Robert Aickman projects…
ON THREEPENNY DOWN by Colin Insole
My review is shown here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/01/23/on-threepenny-down-colin-insole/
THE HOUSE OF THE MOON by Benjamin Tweddell
A beautiful tome to house this novelette that ranges from the ‘drowsy languor’ of Julian’s boyhood and a rusty gate towards a magical domain and a girl as naiad for whom he has since been yearning, towards something much darker after his mother dies amid revelation of her illicit secrets around the eponymous house, its blind denizens, and the woman or man who had most trapped her yearnings for them…
An adeptly luminous, numinous and, yet, darkly engulfing read within the decorated wrappings of this book, and I have not itemised the plot more exactly for fear of my earlier idyllic thoughts emanating from it now evolving into spoilers.
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/benjamin-tweddell/
THE KNEES OF KIONGA by Rhys Hughes
A classic Rhysian novelette now even further enhanced by this fine luxurious volume as decorated with art by Heo Tsop.
For some idea of what I thought about its plot, HERE is my original review of it. Since then I have read a story elsewhere entitled SAUDADE so I was further intrigued by this word’s inspiring conceit of yearning, indeed a twofold yearning in the Rhys for two native lands resolved by the mad scientific transport of it by kangaroo hops — a part of one land (KIONGA Triangle in Africa) across land toward Portugal. And to prove I have, as a word maverick, somehow already associated the word SAUDADE (French: sauter?) with jumping, and, now, in the Rhys, hopping — hopping towards a purchase of a shop(!), and, so, this is my review a few weeks ago of that very story HERE.
Upon re-reading the Rhys, I was re-struck by an old man whose many wrinkles had widened into one smooth-looking wrinkle of skin, and his poached ivory teeth, the meta-writing of this plot that the author surrenders to his created character’s kangaroo hops instead of movement by millipede legs, some of the blood and fire of history surrounding two world wars and the more boring facts (for me) of such a history lesson, the actual increasingly violent, proto-suicidal hops and what they caused by dividing the old man’s story of his duel-disputed romance with a woman, and the friction between two geographies as symbol of their kiss…
and “‘I came over in it, actually. All the way from the Triangle.’ / Now I was confused. ‘Sorry?’” as a witty deliberate echo of a confusion already deployed by an earlier apparent large-type upper-case typo, rather than correcting it!
And, somehow, six years later in my own old wrinkled age, this has NOW become one of my favourite Rhysian stories instead of not being one of them!